Abstract

The Aspiring Leaders Programme involves a partnership between University of Cumbria and Brathay Trust. Students study for a BA in Social Enterprise Leadership, and they receive residential leadership training and diverse work experience in social enterprises. The degree is taught through blended learning, including intensive “University Days” and Action Learning Sets. Course team meetings are attended by staff from the University and the Brathay Trust. At one such meeting, it was observed that students participating in an experiential learning exercise during a Brathay residential had measured their own success in terms of teamwork goals achieved and not in terms of task goals achieved. They felt they had done well through working together well even though they had not achieved the intended outcome. This led to a discussion amongst the course team about how to extend students' perceptions of success as the course progresses through levels 4, 5 and 6, and how this can be transferred between the experiential and academic aspects of the course.

This presentation explores the links between experiential and traditional academic learning that emerge from this closely integrated blended learning programme. It draws on literature concerning perceptions of success in social enterprise (Parkinson and Howorth, 2008) and in the authors' home disciplines of Accounting (Green, 2012) and Information Systems (Cheng and Chen, 2015). It builds on work recently done by the authors (Ryder and Greenwood, 2015) by investigating the success of blended learning development projects.

We conclude that experiential learning provides multiple dimensions of success and learning opportunities and that this is reminiscent of previous work done on stakeholders' perceptions of success (Greenwood, 2007), It also relates to discussions surrounding differences between intended and emergent learning outcomes. Through this work we see that academics need to articulate what they mean by success while recognising the value of multiple success dimensions to the various participants.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item
(Paper)

Departments:

Faculty of Education, Arts and Business > Business, Law, Policing and Social Sciences > Business